October 13, 2007

Nobel Peace Prize and the Grid

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

A perhaps underappreciated aspect of this award is that (as I have noted previously)
the climate model simulation data that underpinned the IPCC analysis
was made available to the international community via the Earth System Grid, which itself uses (among other things) Globus software. Thus the Grid and Globus communities could (if they were less modest) claim a tiny little bit of credit for that prize.

The next phase of IPCC will require the analysis of far more
data than in the current round, as models become yet more sophisticated
and more scenarios are run. The next phase of Earth System Grid will
feature a more decentralized, federated structure to enable this
analysis.